The present invention relates to the electrical, electronic and computer arts, and, more particularly, to unmanned aerial vehicles (“drones” or “UAVs”) and the like.
Robots, generally, have been developed over several decades to interact with humans either in response to human commands, or proactively. Robot behavior can be determined by means of a robot “personality” that defines how the robot will react to particular commands or other stimuli. For example, a robot can be provided with a character trait module that stores character traits, a user can enable the robot to have any character trait, a robot state management module correspondingly generates different states of the robot under the action of different kinds of external input information according to different character traits of the robot, and the different states are expressed through a robot emotion expressing module. Well-known machine learning algorithms can be used to autonomously develop or evolve a robot's personality in response to user inputs.
Drones are a type of flying robot that have been developed over the past decade to operate increasingly autonomously. Within the last few years, drones have become smaller and less expensive. During the same time period, relatively inexpensive drones have been programmed to operate in autonomous groups or “swarms”—for example, with one or more drones as “leaders” and others as “followers.”